For my Professional Practice, I helped a friend, Tony Stirpe, shoot a short film for the 30th Anniversary of his old comedy group, The Farcide. I had always heard that everything moves very slowly on a film and they take longer than expected, but I was still surprised at how slowly everything moved, and he said it would take about five hours, but I was out with them for six to seven hours, and they had to come back and shoot more without me the next day.

A friend of Tony’s brought his drone to help Tony with a few of the shots, and I executed a number of shots as well, a few of which ended up in the final edit, so both of those were really cool experiences. Most of the film takes place inside and just outside of a car, so we shot it on top of a downtown parking garage, so we could easily shoot in and around the car, and the drone could fly off the sides of the parking garages to get some really cool shots of downtown Eugene and the surrounding area. Overall, it was definitely boring for a lot of the time, and long, but there were some very fun, rewarding experiences as well, and it was really cool to watch the final project and see my shots in there. Here is a short interview with Tony Stirpe about the project:

Who all was involved in the project and what are your backgrounds? The project started with myself, Tony Stirpe, Brian Ulinger, and originally Bill Cernansky. I have a lot of background in video production, editing, film and TV. Brian’s the same. He’s worked at Disney, and has been executive producer on at least two feature films, and edited many, many more. We both had a partner, Chris Hudson, who is a director. Chris and I were a producing team for Penthouse, for DB Media, and for Aaron Spelling. Bill is more of a software guy, who’s big into improv. He’s more of an improv comedian. In the end, he was useless. So, primarily me and Brian. The people we recruited to help us also have a background in the entertainment field. Scott Genovese was a part of the group. He was a musician for a long time. Lauren Fleischman plays the girl. She got into. . . she’s a consult for Pure Romance now. Scott Grey is the guy at the end of the video, with the Emmy, and Scott’s been a writer for cartoons for twenty years now.

What was the purpose of the project? The 30th Anniversary of the comedy group The Farcide.

How long did the shooting take? About 12 hours, split between two half-days.

How long did the editing take? About 100 hours. Really? Oh yeah.

What was the most challenging aspect of it? The mixing. It’s easy to lay the shots in and not care about the quality of where the cuts are, or the sound or anything, but when you really start trying to fine tune the levels and the mixing of everything. That was the most challenging.